© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
"Read anything of Williams you can lay your hands on.. . . His knowledge of jazz is all but unmatched."
- Washington Review
"Martin Williams persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to the very small body of authentic jazz criticism."
- Nat Hentoff
"The most knowledgeable, open-minded, and perceptive American jazz critic today." - The Washington Post
Back when the world was young, I had a university professor who railed at us to include the “Who, what, when, where, why and significance.” for each answer that we entered into our essay examination booklets.
In this way, we would be “set on a course to” explain the importance of the event, person or problem that was the focus of the examination question.
“Think critically; describe and discern; look for multiple causes; come at the thing from a number of perspectives,” he would say.
Little did I know at the time, that this was the perfect formula for training as a Jazz critic, for as the late, distinguished Jazz critic Martin Williams asserts “ … it is the critic’s business to be as perceptive and knowledgeable as he/she can. And critical perception (however much training it needs) is ultimately either there or not there.”
Of course, I understand rationally what Martin is saying, but experientially I rarely put myself in the position of becoming a Jazz critic.
As you may have noticed, I describe and annotate recordings, films and books about Jazz on these pages, but I rarely critically evaluate them in the way that Martin describes as the functional basis for Jazz criticism.
Maybe it’s because I know how hard it is to play this stuff and I don’t want to put down other musician’s efforts and attempts. Or perhaps it is because of a lack of training and/or practice in Jazz criticism
Perhaps, too, my reluctance is the result of not having a clear and complete understanding of exactly what is it that a critic does.
Enter Martin Williams who provides this explanation of “Criticism” in an essay which can be found in his compilation - Jazz In Its Time [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989].
To put the piece in perspective, it was written in 1958, at the height of the modern form of Jazz’s popularity in the USA.
Criticism
“A musician is supposed to have said recently that the criticism of jazz is a kind of joke and that there are no jazz critics. Without agreeing with him entirely, I am very sympathetic to his statement. But I say this to indicate that to me the words critic and criticism are rather special ones. A man who makes comments or reports on jazz records (or books, or plays, or movies) is not necessarily worthy of the title of critic.
The criticism of jazz is, like the criticism of any other art, "popular" or "fine," a kind of criticism. It is not a branch of publicity, nor a sideline of journalism. And a critical ability is not a natural consequence of an enthusiasm for jazz or of a knowledge of jazz, although it needs both of these things.
Philosophers would have us believe that criticism is a branch of philosophy, and some artists that it is a branch of creativity. But criticism has its own muse, and however much enlightenment he constantly gets from both the philosopher and the artist, the critic needs a distinct, innate critical talent, a special sensibility and way of looking at things. His task is of an order much lower than that of either philosopher or artist, of course, but the ability he needs for his job is unique and uncommon, and a man either has it or doesn't have it. If the philosopher or artist (or journalist or historian) also has this critical ability, so much the better.
I think that the state of criticism of jazz in America is low, but I also think that the criticism of movies, plays, music in general, and painting is also low. Literature is lucky — it has a top level of criticism which is an excellent counter to the average American book review.
The innate critical ability is not enough in itself. It needs to be trained, explored, disciplined, and tested like any other talent.
If I recommended that this training should begin with Plato, Aristotle, and Lucretius and end with Eliot, Tovey, and Jung, I would not be saying something academic or pretentious but merely stating the most ordinary commonplace of Western civilization as it exists. And the critic should also know as much as he can of the best criticism being written around him in all fields.
But it is also the critic's business to be as perceptive and knowledgeable as he can. And critical perception (however much training it needs) is ultimately either there or not there.
The critic's questions are "How?" and "Why?" not merely "What?"
The points which follow come, with some changes, from Matthew Arnold. I present them not because I am especially interested in promoting Arnold's attitudes nor in promoting any "system," but because they seem to me to have something to say at this moment to the jazz writer and his reader.
1. The critic's first question is what is the work trying to do? Notice that this does not say, what do you think the artist ought to be trying to do. It also has little to do with a clairvoyant view inside the artist's head. And it assumes that the critic has observed the form of the piece and that he absorbed it with his feelings as well.
2. The second is, how well does it do it, and how and why so?
3. The third is, is it worth doing? Notice that this is the last question and not the first.
4. The critic should compare everything with the best that he knows whenever the comparison seems just and enlightening.
The questions are not easy, but no one ever said that criticism was easy, and even the very best critics can and will fail on at least some of them.
Ultimately, the critic makes a judgment, an evaluation. Value is based, in the final analysis, on feeling, not reason. But by feeling I mean a rational, conscious, individual function. I do not mean emotion which is irrational, impersonal, and can be irresponsible.
We have all heard it said that the criticism of jazz was once left to amateurs. That is not entirely true, nor is there any lack of amateurs today. But we do have now several writing about jazz who, although they really know what criticism is, don't know enough about music. On the other hand, there are some who know music, but don't know what criticism is. In jazz, of course, there is danger in knowing music since we are apt to apply the categories and standards of Western music rigidly and wrongly thereby. And there is also danger in knowing jazz: we may reject truly creative things because our knowledge of the past makes us think we know what a man ought to be doing — but that is true in any art.
The man who reviews jazz records has a terrible task: he can never, like his "classical" brother, judge an interpretation or performance against a norm because every jazz record is, in effect, a new work. Also, as George Orwell said of the hack book reviewer, day after day he must report on performances to which he has had little or no reaction worth committing to print — and that is true of the best critics and is neither a reflection on them nor necessarily on the music.
On the other hand, there could not possibly be as much true creativity in jazz as we are constantly told that there is, even though the medium is very much alive. How many novels, plays, poems, symphonies, paintings done in a year are really excellent?
And I wonder how many promising careers—and lives—have been wrecked because of indiscriminate over-praise. I know of a few personally. Even if a musician is wise enough to discount what passes for criticism in jazz, he would have to be inhuman not to be somehow affected by it.
There is one job in jazz criticism that is neglected and which needs to be done, I think. It is also one which, since jazz is music and music the most abstract of the arts, is very difficult.
It is a better job on content and meaning. I am not opposed to technical analysis. We need more of that, too, and it can also help us with meaning, of course.
But especially now that jazz is so sophisticated, we need to talk frankly and honestly about what it is saying.
By an examination of content, I do not mean a kind of enthusiastic impressionism. Nor do I mean the kind of clever, chi-chi adjective-mongering we are all too familiar with. The critic's duty is accuracy and he should not sacrifice it for cleverness.
Of course, such an examination cannot be made with prejudice or prejudgment. The first question is, what does this music express, not whether or not it should be expressing it.
The thing that separates listeners and commentators into "schools," I am convinced by the way, is not musical devices — passing chords, diminished ninths or sixteenth notes, or the lack of them —
but the content that such devices enable a given style to handle. I think that jazz should be able to express as much as it can possibly learn to express in its own way.
Of course, the artistic and musical expression of emotion is not the same as its communication. A snarl, a sigh, a scream — these things communicate emotion, but they are not art, only a part of the raw material of art which the artist transforms.
I recommend this first, because greater consciousness is a part of growth in an art as well as in an individual.
I also recommend it because the appeal of jazz is still so very irrational, and I do not think it should be so much so any longer. (Of course, the appeal of all art is ultimately irrational, by definition, because it is art. But to many who like jazz, its appeal is almost entirely so.) It is the critic's business to make it less so, and unless he does, both he and jazz may be trapped. And dealing with content is the only way to give a good answer to that third question: is it worth doing?
As it is, we assure ourselves that jazz is an "art" and often proceed to talk about it as if it were a sporting event, an excuse for us to be verbally clever, a branch of big-time show biz, or an emotional outburst that affected us in a way we are not quite sure of. Perhaps we can at least do our best to create the kind of climate in which a jazz critic could function and which an art deserves.” (1958)
This book, using a side-by-side Italian/English format was published in Rome in 1999 by Stampa Alternativa with Darragh Henegan providing the English translation. Each edition of the book included a CD entitled Evans Remembered featuring Pieranunzi in solo piano settings including a track displaying 6 variations of Bill’s composition Very Early. Also included are four, sextet tracks in which Enrico plays his or Bill's original compositions or tunes closely associated with Bill in a group made up of a number of prominent Italian Jazz musicians.
Since it is very difficult to find a copy of this book [and not inexpensive when you do], what follows is an acknowledgement of these requests through the posting of more segments of the book on Jazz Profiles.
“What did it mean for you, as a jazz pianist, to write a book on Bill Evans?
What was your first contact with Evans?
You mean to say that others of Evans' drummers weren't able to do that?
You have played with three drummers, Motian, Zigmund and LaBarbera, whoplayed at one time or another in Evans' trio. How did it make you feel?
On the other hand, you have established a collaborative artistic relationship with Marc Johnson that has lasted for sixteen years now!
What is Evans relevance?
Bill worked hard at the mechanics of music. His musical language was clear and direct. His lyricism and sense of melody flowed as if he were speaking words, sentences and whole paragraphs. He worked within very well-defined limitations by utilizing the popular song form and drew on material ranging from Broadway show tunes to songs from tin-pan alley to movie themes. He wasn't lured to the avant-garde, (although he had the skills to explore that musical world as well), nor was he tempted to follow any trends in the music business with regard to being more commercially viable. Consequently we can listen to Bill from the start of his career as a leader to the end with a sense of continuity; one can clearly hear his development as he grew to a fuller expression of his art. [emphasis, mine].
Certainly, Bill will forever be remembered for his ballad playing. Perhaps that is why he is referred to as "the poet". The "poet" also had in his vocabulary very strong bebop roots as evidenced in the many medium and up-tempo groove tunes performed on his recordings. And if you want a totally different insight into Bill's sense of rhythm and harmony, research the various versions of Nardis spanning Bill's career. It's a mind-blower!
Many of these were uneducated to the idiosyncrasies of jazz or inexperienced listeners to music of any complexity whatsoever. Yet, the audience was usually respectful and remained quiet and attentive for the performances. After a set one night, I was sitting at the bar sipping a coca-cola and this balding, middle-aged man in a suit and tie approached me and told me he was a farmer, that he was in town doing some banking business and this was the first time he had ever heard jazz.
But it wasn't long before dark clouds began rolling in to disturb this peaceful picture. In a photo of Bill taken at the age of eight or nine - one of the rare images in which he appears holding his violin - we begin to note a kind of bewildered melancholy in his eyes, the serious, painful awareness of someone who has lost something very precious and irretrievable. This longing, this questioning, destined to remain unanswered, which we very often hear in Evans' adult music, was already there. Perhaps what psychoanalyst Alice Miller has called "the tragedy of the gifted child" had already begun for the young Bill.
Born Soroka, the daughter of Russian immigrants, Mary's childhood had been hard. Her family was extremely poor and she was sent to live in a convent run by a Russian Orthodox order. It was there that she developed her love for those evocative hymns of the ancient liturgy, a fascination which she later transmitted to her sons. Those solemn and mystical chants left a lasting impression on Bill, hints of which their modality more than anything else would show up many years later in his music.
The process was long and complex: "I had to build my whole musical style. I'd abstract musical principles from people I dug, and I'd take their feeling or technique and apply it to things the way that I'd built them."
Tall and good-looking, Evans was left-handed - a feature that he ingeniously took advantage of in resolving various mechanical/musical problems of jazz piano. Those who were close to him tell us that he was a very sweet, reserved and intelligent man with a subtle, witty sense of humor. He was surely shy but, in any case, not passive, if we are to believe the story that in all the time he spent at Southeastern Louisiana College none of his teachers was able to make him do scales, arpeggios or the like that study of "technique" in other words that none of his fellow students was able to escape.
His first composition, Very Early, dates back to those years. It was already marked with Evans' unmistakable style, both for its formal aspects - the sort of dialogue between the various sections - as well as for its push/pull mood, which perfectly fit in with the harmonic movement. The piece is in waltz tempo and is based on a lyrical, interrogative thematic cell which takes on a new meaning each time it reappears in a different key. Very Early is a piece well before its time - the first, juicy fruit of a profound and highly personal compositional talent.
Discharged early in 1954, he spent that whole year in New Jersey at the home of his parents. Only occasionally did he go into New York City, and the infrequency of these visits were not enough to make himself better known on that jazz scene. "It's not the kind of place that immediately opens its heart to you. It can eat you alive, crush you, break you. It can do anything to you." Evans would later say, describing that metropolis. In 1963 he dedicated N.Y.C.'s No Lark [Conversations With Myself, Verve V-8526; CD 821 984-2] one of his most desolate compositions, to the city's darkest, most anguishing and hopeless side. The piece, a kind of disturbing dirge-like chant alluded, in reality, to the premature death as a result of drug addiction of pianist Sonny Clark, a musician whom Evans had deeply admired (Clark's name is encrypted in the song's anagram title). This tragedy put Evans in mind of his own "internal death". Those bitter and strained thoughts about the Big Apple were surely related to the "personal problems" which were plaguing Evans in the early 1960s. He lived practically his whole life with them but, due to his reserved nature, he was never led into the kind of shocking scandals which jazz musicians have long been famous for. This very sad experience, which tragically marked his life and music, was something that he kept under wraps.
The personnel that Russell had planned for that first session on March 31st included Art Farmer, trumpet; Hal McKusick, alto saxophone; Barry Galbraith, guitar; Milt Hinton, double bass; and Joe Harris, drums - which meant for the 27-year-old Evans a much more prestigious company than he had been accustomed to. The session also represented an immense leap in quality with respect to Russell's compositions which, even today at a distance of more than forty years, retain a noteworthy complexity. They recorded four selections that day. Evans felt comfortable. He showed that he was in possession of exactly the background required to confidently follow the path traced by Russell in his composition; this means an extensive preparation in and exposure to classical music and, in addition, that sort of perseverance which, over the years, had helped him to absorb the Bop language, and later that of the so-called cool jazz (Tristano, Konitz).
The same cockiness, joy and rhythmic exuberance, together with a complete mastery of phrasing (a special mixture of bop and cool) can be found in their entirety in New Jazz Conceptions [Riverside 223(M); OJCCD 025.2], the first album that Evans recorded under his own name. It was recorded a few weeks before his solo in Concerto for Billy The Kid, and, who knows, maybe something of the great satisfaction he felt for having realized the first completely self-generated product of his musical life, ended up in the overwhelming spirit of that famous solo. It is true that, regardless of the increased faith in his skills gained with the recording of New Jazz Conceptions, it did not come about without doubts and insecurities. Orrin Keepnews, owner of the then newborn Riverside label, remembers that “it took a lot to convince him that he was ready to record, which is the opposite of what usually happens.” (It had been guitarist Mundell Love, occasional partner of the pianist during their college years in Louisiana and very much impressed by him, who had got Keepnews to listen to a tape of Evans over the phone). So, where did all these doubts come from? Evans seemed to be insecure about whether he had anything to say or not, and in need of someone to acknowledge his talent - something which probably went back to his childhood - but at the same time his playing expressed a deep strength, an unconscious impulse to reveal his inner self in sound.
We find on New Jazz Conceptions all the emotion of the first-timer called upon to show what he's made of Even the three very short piano solos on this LP echo this both tense and enthusiastic atmosphere. The Ellington-esque I Got It Bad is expounded with wide-ranging chords in open harmony, making of the piano a veritable big band and recalling the broad concert style of Art Tatum. The tender Waltz For Debby, written a couple of years earlier for the daughter of his beloved brother Harry, also has a somewhat bitter sound, a far cry from that dancing softness that, over the years, would make of this piece a sort of manifesto of Evans' poetics. A great vehemence, tempered as always with elegance, permeates this first Bill Evans album, thanks also to the generous contributions of Teddy Kotick and Paul Motian. This encounter with this drummer who was to play such an important role in Evans' artistic future was not actually the first one. About one year earlier, in fact, the two had happened to work together. “I first met Bill Evans at an audition in New York”, Motian recalls, “It was for a tour with Jerry Wald, a clarinet player who had had some success with a big band and was now organizing a sextet for a small East Coast tour. Even before Bill sat down at the piano, I knew he could play. I overheard someone say, 'That's Bill Evans from Plainfield, New Jersey. He's supposed to be real good.”
The technique of harmonizing (see his Displacement or a standard like My Romance) sounds totally innovative. In the first of these two, Evans seems to think like an arranger voicing a given melody for several sections, taking care to avoid the so-called "doublings" (the same note played by more than one instrument) that impoverish the general resonance of the orchestra.
Two of Evans' compositions on New Jazz Conceptions, the aforementioned Displacement and Five, foretell an important aspect of his piano approach: cross-rhythms - a feature of his piano style not to be underestimated. In Displacement the whole first part of the theme uses rhythmic accents which do not coincide with the beats. The regular rhythmic flux, crossed by another "oblique" rhythmical line, creates such tension that, at a certain point, it leads to an unavoidable tempo change (from 4/4 to 3/4). This alternating of even/odd tempos was to be a rather frequent aspect in Evans' music, both in his original compositions (Peri-Scope) and in his re-workings of old standards (Someday My Prince Will Come). Five is so-named because its melody presents a characteristic counterpoint of five notes per bar contrasting with the usual 4-beat tempo. This "5 against 4" creates a curious "limping" effect that, in the middle section of the piece, turns into a sort of giddy, circular dance. This piece would later become, especially during the 1960s, the signature tune at the end of many performances by the Evans trios.
Nineteen-fifty-six came to an end for Evans with two further studio experiences: a big band session under the direction of clarinetist and arranger Tony Scott (Bill contributed with an arrangement of Davis'Walkin' that gave proof of his audacious harmonic ideas), and the recording of four more pieces to complete the work begun with George Russell in March. Scott, struck by Evans' talent, took great pains in that period to introduce the young pianist to the New York City jazz scene. The esteem of musicians like Scott and the faith of a courageous producer like Keepnews were not long in bearing fruit.
In fact, through the entire following year and the beginning of 1958 Evans was more and more sought after as a sideman in recording studios. His ability to give a touch of class to any musical situation, and his speed and precision in sight-reading, quickly helped to increase his work opportunities. He recorded with Don Elliott (a trumpet player and vibraphonist Evans had played with in his high school band), Eddie Costa, Joe Puma, Jimmy Knepper and Helen Merrill. Two recordings in particular drew the attention of the public, the critics and his fellow-musicians: the piece All About Rosie (first performed on a TV program, and later recorded in the studio), and his work on "East Coasting", an album by bassist Charlie Mingus. 
It was, perhaps, exactly that solo which gave Mingus the impetus to call him in on his sextet project "East Coasting", recorded in August of the same year. The great bassist deeply admired Evans' ability to consider soloing on the piano a construction formally connected with themes initially set up by the horns, and not merely an exhibition of technical virtuosity for its own purposes. The respect that Evans had earned in the jazz environment had reached a high level by then. His essential, richly shaded and profound style had not escaped the attention of musicians used to keeping their acute ears to the ground in search of new and exciting things.
Early in 1958, Miles Davis called and invited him to spend a weekend in Philadelphia - this was the beginning of one of the most intense periods in Evans' artistic career. Playing with Miles Davis meant nothing less than being part of the best-loved jazz group in the world at the moment; but it also meant, understandably, considerable physical and emotional stress. Life 'on-the-road' proved to be quite demanding, and then we mustn’t forget the hard-hitting musical excellence of the group itself ("I had the feeling I was playing with a bunch of supermen," Evans reported, referring to John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, not to mention Davis himself). Moreover, Davis and his group were idols for black Americans, and the idea that Miles had called a white guy in to take Red Garland's place didn't exactly make them jump for joy. (Evans later complained about the "silent treatment" he had received.) Regardless of all this, psychologically and artistically-speaking these were very valuable months for Evans, because that period helped him overcome his uncertainty and lack of faith, to the point where it could even be said that it was him that exerted a subtle but strong influence on the group's music.
Evans' classical background was crucial to this process. Davis, again in his autobiography, remembers that "Bill brought a great knowledge of classical music, people like Rachmaninov and Ravel," and moreover he recalls that "besides Ravel and a whole lot of others, Bill Evans had turned me on to Aram Khachaturian, a Russian-Armenian composer. I had been listening to him and what intrigued me about him were all those different scales he used." Evans played with Davis regularly from February to November of 1958, a period of which only a few, important recordings are left to testify. Three of these, recorded in May, are especially interesting. In each of these selections (On Green Dolphin Street, Fran-Dance and Stella By Starlight) Evans does some solos that we could call premodal. He simply creates peaceful, wide melodic lines harmonized with two hands, and completely abandons the long hornlike sequences typical of the bop approach. Evans lays down his chords calmly and unhurriedly and leaves them resounding for a long time. Those sonorous silences create a sense of waiting for something that is never going to happen. His choice of notes forming the chords (what is commonly called voicing) is made dissonant by the frequent use of major second intervals, something which has more to do with achieving luminosity than with making the chords harsh.
Evans improvises and admirably harmonizes melodic "micronuclei" that follow a distant trace of the original melody and sound like its echo. Here we have an inner song, a sort of resounding and response to the given melody, sung by no one but seeming as if someone were singing it (hadn't Davis maybe done this shortly before?). So those micronuclei float like water-lilies on Chambers and Cobb's relaxed, swinging ‘walk.’
He also played with George Russell on his New York, N.Y. [Decca /GRP MVCR 20051] album, one of the most successful experiments conceived by that untiring, avant-garde composer who assembled, over the course of those three recording sessions, no less than John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Bob Brookmeyer, Max Roach, Jon Hendricks and others.
Young And Foolish was, in all probability, a piece that Evans chose not only for its attractive melody, but for its title and lyrics as well. The titles of many tunes that Evans played and recorded in his career seem, in fact, to reflect a sort of commentary or an opinion he had of himself. Other times they seem to ask questions or appear to have some relationship to the more intimate details of his life. Evans, the shy young pianist who always blamed himself for not being good enough - as Keepnews had observed - probably identified with the "young and foolish" of which the song spoke.
The three piano solos on the album seem to connect back to the three on the earlier "New Jazz Conceptions", but here everything sounds much more relaxed, evolved and original. Lucky To Be Me is treated with rare harmonic skill and, once again, is a piece Evans has chosen perhaps for its title and for its “story,” apart from the melody itself. On this number, interpretation and narration prevail over improvisation, and Evans also displays a range of harmonic solutions worthy of a top composer/arranger. The voicing appears more and more personal, linked not so much to jazz piano tradition as to the harmonic approach of classical 20th century European composers.
Evans' music, therefore, conceals autobiographical content which is always advanced with extreme reserve. It often recounts stories or intimate impressions steeped in a profound "death wish", revealing a secret world encoded, perhaps, in a title, a play on words or in the text of songs interpreted through the filter of the pianist's intense approach. For instance, at a certain point, the words of Young And Foolish ask “Why is it wrong to be young and foolish? We haven't so long to be. Soon enough the carefree days, the sun-lit days go by.” Or even in Spring Is Here - which Evans was soon to record with LaFaro and Motian, soaring to one of those peaks in his art - the lyrics respond, alongside a slow, yearning and irresistibly questioning string of ascending notes, “maybe it's because nobody needs me;” and then further on, at a parallel point in the piece, “maybe it's because nobody loves me.” Was it because of this sense of abandonment, of futility, this feeling of being unloved, that the Spring was unable to "make his heart dance"?
With his live recordings for Argo at the Pershing Room [Lounge] in Chicago, IL and the Spotlite Club in Washington, D.C., one musician who employed a style that avoided the hectic and frenetic pace of bebop and its hard bop counterpart was pianist Ahmad Jamal.
Dismissed at the time by many of the reigning Jazz critics as little more than "cocktail music" or, perish the thought, "commercial" recordings, the immensely entertaining music on these recordings displays an individual virtuosity and group cohesiveness that is easy to respect but difficult to emulate.
In music, a scale refers to an ordered series of intervals which, along with the key or tonic, defines the pitches.
And no one understands this better than Enrico Pieranunzi as is explained in his chapter from Bill Evans: The Pianist as an Artist entitled:
Even though he was no longer part of the group, Miles Davis called him to record an album, that very quickly would prove to be one of the all-time masterpieces of jazz. Destined to become a cult album for the most informed of jazz fans, it was, and still is, also able to attract an audience usually drawn to other forms of music. Kind Of Blue [CL1355; CK64935] was recorded in two sessions, one on March 2nd and the other on April 22nd [1959]. Evans played on four selections, two per session: So What and Blue in Green for the first, and Flamenco Sketches and All Blues for the second. It was Evans who wrote the album’s liner notes, and it is very interesting to read with what penetrating clarity he analyzes the process of improvisation.
This album represents a unique moment of convergence in the artistic paths of these two artists - a bit like one of those intersecting of orbits, that kind of extraordinary astronomic event that happens only once every several hundred years. Evans' piano work had by now achieved the maximum in evocative refinement, the tone of his chords had all but dematerialized; it seemed to speak of far-off abstract things while, nevertheless, maintaining a kind of subterranean tension and a sense of restless expectation.
Evans' use of open, harmonically multifaceted chords contributed enormously to making"Kind Of Blue" an album that blazed a new trail for jazz [emphasis mine]. His work with Davis also gave Evans much more visibility. At the beginning of the 1960s we find him ranked third (after Thelonious Monk and Oscar Peterson!) in the critics poll of Down Beat magazine. It was time for the thirty-year-old pianist to put together his own stable group. He called in drummer Kenny Dennis and bass player Jimmy Garrison for a few evening club dates.
Portrait In Jazz [Riverside RLP-1161; OJCCD 088-2] was the first of four albums that the trio were to make - a limited production but of the highest artistic quality, which was to influence whole generations of jazz musicians all over the world. The trio's innovative intentions were only partially carried out in Portrait In Jazz. Evans was aware, as were his partners, that “nobody at that time was 'opening up music like they were, letting the music originate from a beat that was more implied than explicit.” He had a gift for shaping music and a capacity to make every part of the improvisation spring consequentially from the previous one: an approach that the pianist asked his partners to extend to the total form of the piece. When it worked, when the three of them played like one single individual entity, the result was breathtaking. Autumn Leaves (second version) is an example of that success, as is What Is This Thing Called Love. Here the trio offers a glimpse into some completely new mechanisms: like when Motian ventures into audacious multi-rhythmical initiatives, with LaFaro strongly and profoundly accenting the pulse; or when, in the same piece, they experiment with the dynamic contrast between duet (Evans and LaFaro dialoguing while Motian stays silent) and fully active trio.
The performances on Portrait In Jazz are uneven from the point of view of the "simultaneous improvisation" approach, which had not yet developed at the time. The artistic rendition also doesn't always maintain the same level. Evans would later say, for instance, that the version of When Fall In Love on this album was one of the most incoherent and disconnected that he had ever recorded; and, in effect, upon careful listening, one discovers here and there some empty, somewhat ingenuous areas in the construction of the solo. Evans was notoriously demanding with himself and here he recognized some gaps in the logic of the solo that couldn't help but bother him.
Finally, in terms of Evans' trio work, Blue In Green should not be forgotten. This is the piece for which Evans had claimed paternity and which, for incomprehensible reasons, was and continues to be attributed to Davis. [emphasis mine]. Actually, Miles, before the Kind Of Blue session, had only given Evans the first two chords, from which the pianist spun the entire composition. In any case, in this trio version of the tune, he doubles the time twice, allowing LaFaro to move completely autonomously, both melodically and rhythmically. Apart from this number, however, the general atmosphere of the album does not sound as revolutionary as the trio's live performances a year and a half later at the Village Vanguard would. More than a year were to pass between the trio's first and second recordings.
Explorations [RLP-351; OJCCD 037-2] was recorded on February 2, 1961. The demanding, critical Evans was in no rush to record, something which made Keepnews very anxious. The Riverside label was going through an expansion and image-building phase in which Evans played no small part. Between Portrait inJazz and Explorations the trio went on the road, playing a few nights at Birdland in the spring of 1960, but Evans carried on with his activity as sideman. By now he was a deluxe contributor to contexts very distant from him, like J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding's quintet, with whom he recorded in the Fall of that same year, or the four-trombone septet led by Winding himself with whom he recorded that December. He was in dire need of funds. He had to do studio work with various groups other than his trio to support his narcotics habit, a problem that over the years was becoming increasingly serious, and which created a constant need for money. His producer's loans were not always enough to get him out of the disastrous situation that his self-destructive side had landed him in. As if in a sort of double-exposure, Bill pursued his musical objectives with great honesty and intellectual lucidity while his private life was deeply marred. The heroin weakened his perception of an outside world that seemed all too tough to him. It was his refuge, but a punishment as well – the price of such a gift.
How Deep is the Ocean
The roles are inverted for a while in Nardis. The theme stated, LaFaro soars into a magnificent solo (maybe this amazing performance had something to do with the fact that just two days earlier he had recorded the Atlantic album Ornette! with Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell); Evans backs him with a simple but engagingly voiced melody, its tone permeated with that French Impressionist aura he loved. He is extremely sensitive in adapting to LaFaro's improvisational line, accurately choosing the height of the sounds and alternating open or close harmony to modulate the color of his voicing. When Bill's turn comes up his very colloquial solo proves how maximum results can be achieved with minimum means. His right hand, in fact, plays a few sparing notes loaded with an emotionally dense "specific weight", giving us a clear example of his ability to make the piano “a complete expressive musical medium.” LaFaro then takes up his own individual path, playing in counterpoint to the new melody that Evans is extemporaneously composing and interpreting on the piece's chord changes. Finally, in its coda, Nardis offers us a fleeting memory of the celebrated Prelude in C Sharp Minor, by Rachmaninov, whose marked Russian-ness he had always been very fond of. 
Beyond everything already said above, and the fact that the version that we are talking about was the first that Evans recorded in trio, Nardis deserves a special digression, which is a little story in itself. As any jazz student or professional jazz player knows, in every jazz tune collection Nardis is generally credited to Miles Davis even though, surprisingly, its composer never recorded it. According to a personal recollection of Evans', referring to a 1958 session with Cannonball Adderley, “Miles came along to the studio with it, and you could see that the guys were struggling with it. Miles wasn't happy with it either but after the date he said that I was the only one to play it in the way that he wanted. I must have helped his royalties over the years, because I have never stopped playing it. It has gone on evolving with every trio I have had!”
His musical processes are, of course, technically analyzable. In the first of the two selections, for instance, he never plays the original melody, landing there only at the very end of a sort of (re) compositional journey founded on completely new melodic lines. Warren Bernhardt, pianist and Evans' personal friend, states that despite the fact that he never plays the original melody here, he brings out its “quintessence.” The something that makes How Deep Is The Ocean (as it did Spring Is Here) an extremely significant musical event is to be found, in reality, in silence, in the unspoken - but for this reason spoken in a more penetrating way – “communication by implication.”
In the spring of 1961, since the trio was going strong, they decided to risk a live album, notwithstanding all the technical problems associated with this type of recording, which was not so common a practice at that time. The planned date was Sunday, June 25th, the last day of a two-week gig at the Village Vanguard. The trio played five sets that day, two in the afternoon between 4.30 and 6.30, and three in the evening, starting at 9.30. A total of thirteen pieces were recorded, five of which only once, others twice, and only a couple (Gloria's Step and All Of You) three times. Some selections had never been recorded by the trio before; another (LaFaro's Jade Visions), turned into a sort of "public rehearsal". Finally, My Romance and Waltz For Debby, which Evans had recorded unaccompanied on his debut album, were re-packaged for the trio setting.
Although the concert takes place before an audience, the three seem to interact exclusively among themselves and relate only to the music. This contributes to the almost palpable, breath-taking density of these recordings where the musicians follow their itinerary of pure, almost merciless honesty. In the background you hear the chatter and laughter of the audience, but the trio pays no heed. Each of them is totally concentrated on his own sound while carefully listening to that of the others: the inner mechanism of the trio has been carried to its perfect balance. Each of the three completes a little revolution, My Foolish Heart (which Evans records for the first time here) being an excellent example. Here only the melody is played, but the calm sense of humble and participant singing with which Evans interprets Young's song is exalted by the parsimonious interventions of LaFaro, whose profound and resonant notes seem to anxiously await the melody in astonishment, and to dialogue with it. This performance is permeated with the sense of the yet-to-be-discovered, an unknown dimension in which Motian’s role is decisive; in fact, he plays with the melody, making of the delicate contact between his brushes and cymbals emotionally meaningful interjections that closely follow the "little story in music" that Evans is telling.
LaFaro is the real co-protagonist of this historical recording. His relationship with Evans is telepathic. He inserts himself naturally among the piano's silences and breaths, almost always stubbornly refusing to ‘walk’ as the majority of his colleagues did in those days. Even in All Of You, where he could do it, he breaks up the tempo, thus creating a contrast with Motian. Observing these performances a bit more closely, it is clear that some of the material has to do with Miles Davis, both because they use two of his compositions (Solar and Milestones) and because of some important performances of his (All Of You and Gershwin's My Man’s Gone Now and I Loves You Porgy). All of which is understandable given Evans’ recent association with the trumpeter.
In terms of how to sequence the presentation of material from Enrico’s book on Bill Evans, the Jazz Profiles editorial staff debated as to placing this next chapter as the close of Part 3, thus concluding that section with Scotty’s death and the end of the “First Trio.”
Initially with Red Mitchell on bass and then for the last two weeks with Chuck Israels, Bill played the month of May at Shelly Manne’s Manne-Hole in Hollywood, CA essentially as a duo [with Shelly sitting in on occasion]. In looking for a permanent drummer for the group, Chuck Israels recounts the following story in his liner notes to Bill Evans Trio at Shelly’s Manne Hole [Riverside 487; OJCCD 263]:
As his friend and my mentor, I am privileged to have a number of personal recollections that Larry Bunker shared with me about his time as a member of Bill’s trio, but before recounting these, let’s pick up the story of Bill and Scotty’s relationship and what was to come following Scotty’s death with this next chapter from Enrico Pieranunzi, Bill Evans: The Pianist as an Artist entitled:
The Village Vanguard Sessions well-illustrates the contrast between the iconoclast LaFaro and the introverted, subtly conservative Evans. The young bass player who lived life to the fullest “and tasted it down to the last drop wanted more than anything to take risks” (“I don’t like to look back because the whole point in jazz is doing it now.”) This he does with extraordinary results in All Of You, lingering a long time on a very dissonant minor second, that he "walks" confidently along the piece, refusing to stay consonant with the chord flow; or in Milestones, where LaFaro even succeeds in dragging Evans along on a couple of very daring excursions, from which the pianist withdraws immediately to go back to chiseling out his bewitching neo-Impressionistic harmonies. Also in this piece, the bass player seems deliberately to refuse to "walk" in 4/4 in the footsteps of Motian’s orthodox comping, preferring to depart with a solo line of his own that counterpoints what Evans' is doing with his piano. At the end of the tune, LaFaro fools around rather provocatively with some notes, to the laughter of the crowd, while Evans stays locked himself inside his dark, doubt-filled world.
Other roads, with their hidden perils, were waiting to seal Scott LaFaro's tragic fate. At the end of those historic sets, as the three were leaving the Village Vanguard, he had spontaneously expressed with great joy to Motian and Evans, “these two weeks have been exceptional, I've finally made an album I'm happy with!” On the night of July 5 1961, ten days after that magical evening, while going home after a visit to a friend, and having ignored the urgings of pianist-composer Gap Mangione to stay over and leave the next day, he lost control of his Chrysler and went off the road into a tree. Both he and the friend riding with him were killed instantly.
Israels, as compared with LaFaro, was another thing altogether. Although less spectacular (besides, who could ever have equaled that genius?) he proved, in his four-year collaboration with Evans, a remarkable musical intelligence, a highly developed capacity to deeply feel and interact with the expressive moods of his leader, and a solid, dynamic swing as well. These qualities contributed greatly to his overcoming Evans' doubts and put him back on the road to developing his trio. The group would never reach the peaks that it had with LaFaro, but often was to offer some very valid examples of a "modern" trio. The experimental approach of the period 1959-61 having already been tested and approved, Israels managed to place himself as one of the three voices of a group where interplay was by now common procedure. In spite of a lower degree of authority and rhythmic/harmonic audacity than LaFaro, Israels was capable of not limiting himself to the standard role of accompanist, and to not passively seconding what the pianist was doing.
Israels' playing, in fact, was essential, and never went out-of-bounds as LaFaro's could sometimes seem to go. He pushed Evans to tell his musical stories "completely', without interfering with them, and did not force the pianist in directions where, perhaps, he did not want to go at that particular moment. Precisely for this reason perhaps some of Evans' albums with Israels and Motian, or with Larry Bunker on the drums, reach artistic peaks just as high as those of his period with LaFaro. Of course, after LaFaro's death, the innovative impetus in which he had involved the reluctant Evans came to an abrupt halt. No link, not even an indirect one, existed between Israels and the most experimental expressions of the time (Coleman, Dolphy, etc.) The new bass player did not oppose Evans' conservative tendencies, on the contrary he adapted himself.
But the twofold pressure of Israels and the state of his finances brought him back to music. He had no choice - he needed money - and his main point of reference was none other than Keepnews himself. He was constantly asking for advances and usually the producer gave in, but not without some compensation - and this meant recordings. The risk, of course, was a sort of unplanned, mass-production which neither of them, for different reasons, wanted, but the situation offered few alternatives. So 1962 ended as one of Evans' most intensely active years in the recording studio with him working hard to repay Keepnews' generosity. He heavily increased his compositional activity, to the extent that he would carry his music notebook with him at all times, where ideas and themes could be tossed down on the road or during breaks in club performances. Show-Type Tune was practically completed on a New York subway train.
This sequence of "modes" recalls some musical atmospheres of Miles Davis'Kind of Blue (So What or Blue In Green), even though Evans is moving away from that "objective" and distant approach, going towards a narrative, autobiographical and tense framework. This song is part of that group of Evans' compositions (for example, Peace Piece) in which the harmony commands the melody, pieces that we could call "themes with variations". They lend themselves to a type of treatment that is closer to that used by Bach in his well-known Ciaccona, or by Chopin in his Berceuse, than to a (re)compositional process possible on the harmonic changes of a song. The harmonic sequences of this type of piece create a sort of hypnotic circularity which, because of its reiteration, is less subject to wide emotional leaps. In 1962, along with this intensification of his compositional and studio work, Evans' drug habit started to get really heavy. Gene Lees, his personal friend and supporter, tells of sordid scenes of his need for a fix, of the cynicism of the loan-sharks and dealers (one of whom was nicknamed "Bebop"), of the electricity being cut off for non-payment of bills. Ellaine, Evans' sweet girlfriend - strung out herself - made a desperate, fruitless, attempt to get Bill off dope by quitting first herself, going as far as to write up a pledge that she tried to convince Bill to sign. Evans lived through all this hell with an extraordinarily shocking lucidity; he knew perfectly well that this nightmarish experience was “like death and transfiguration.” “Every day you wake in pain like death and then you go out and score, and that is transfiguration” he would say: “each day becomes all of life in a microcosm.”
“[In 1962] Circumstances were forcing Bill to widen his sphere of musical activity. The trio was no longer the only group requiring his attention. In addition to his increased compositional activity, in July/August of 1962 Evans recorded two splendid quintet albums which were originally issued as a single LP called Interplay [Riverside LP 9445] and subsequently as a double LP entitled The Interplay Sessions, [Milestone 47055] and that later became the CDs Interplay [OJCCD-308-2] and Loose Bloose [Milestone 9200].
‘Who’ was playing on these dates is something that Bill kept closely in his focus as he was developing the music for these dates. The musicians common to both recordings, drummer Philly Joe Jones and guitarist Jim Hall, were Evans’ preferred performers on their instruments. 
The trumpet player on the first recording was the then emerging Freddie Hubbard, while on the second LP it was Zoot Sims who had risen to prominence as one of Woody Herman’s ‘Four Brothers’ at the end of the 1940’s.
The most relevant factor of these two albums lay precisely in Evans’ ability to match the material to the color and tone of the instruments that he had chosen for these sessions. Both albums highlight his talent as an arranger, one who is able to treat a small group like a big band. In some selections, the theme is presented by the trumpet and guitar using the latter as a sort of second horn; in others, the guitar is phrased with the other string instrument, the bass.
Working out of Philly Joe Jones’ generous rhythmic pulse, he recaptures in some solos that hard bopper verve demonstrated in New Jazz Conceptions and Everybody Digs Bill Evans. In particular, Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams– a title which is perfectly appropriate to the difficult period in which Evans perhaps yearned to shed his problems and dreamed of a better life – there is an almost joyful simplicity in the phrasing. It is as if Evans was searching back in time for his personal ‘golden age’ when, as a teenager, he had discovered and learned to love Jazz.
These two tunes are, in fact, very close in their construction to some of the great composer’s works: a sequence of tenths as played by the guitar and bass forms a calm and almost solemn harmonic framework while the melody unfolds in counterpoint to it.
On the other hand, the Loose Bloose with the sensual and splendidly relaxed tenor sax of Zoot Sims evokes a decidedly “cool,” vaguely Tristano, atmosphere, especially when Evans assigns some lines to the sax/guitar combination creating a sound very close to the Konitz/Marsh/Bauer ensemble of Tristano’s best known recordings.
In February 1963 Evans' extreme withdrawal into himself produced an album that was a hit with the critics. Conversations With Myself (which won the Grammy Award for best instrumental jazz performance of 1963; Verve V6-8526; CD 821-984-2) was made by over-dubbing three recordings of himself, thereby creating a sort of "three-pianist trio.”
Three months later, in May of 1963, going along with Creed Taylor's often disputable taste, Evans recorded an album for MGM on which his performance consisted simply of playing famous Hollywood themes according to the most banal and simplistic parameters of elevator music. Despite the slick presentation in the liner notes (“Evans can explore a pop tune and give it a dignity and meaning it never received before”), the album collapses into a completely conventional, commercialized product, whose total disengagement was in deep contrast with the constant appeal to beauty that Evans was always making in his statements. Evans restricts himself to playing the melody of the pieces in the most pedestrian way imaginable, succeeding in coming dangerously close, if not in fact crossing over, into the style of sequined ballroom entertainers. Evans, aware of this self-annihilation and, disturbed by the whole thing, thought at first of hiding behind his Russian name, but after releasing the album he rationalized that “if this record could have done something for widening my audience, getting better distribution for my other records, I'm all for it. Because it's a cold, hard business.” His hopes of making money, however, didn't pan out but somehow, perhaps in spite himself, he managed to avoid ruining his artistic image forever. The brilliant arranger Claus Ogerman had been brought in for the occasion, and would go on to work with Evans on various other recording projects, the most successful among which the album Symbiosis in 1974.
The live album shows an Israels clearly evolved, compared with the shy bass player of "Moonbeams" and "How My Heart Sings" of the previous year. The trio seemed to have found a new equilibrium, with Israels and Bunker maybe not exactly "flying", but deep enough to give Evans the solid, calm, supportive tranquility he needed. His repertoire in those years remained more or less static. He composed very little, performing, at least up until 1966, his compositions previous to 1962, along with standards and pop songs, every now and then adding on a new one. Only occasionally did he take on the blues (the splendid Blues in F and Swedish Pastry on the live album at Shelly's Manne Hole, for example), reinforcing his image as the introverted, romantic and solitary musician.
Something noteworthy was happening in those early 60s: Evans music was settling down into something less audacious than what he had done with Miles Davis or Scott LaFaro while, at the same time, his fame was growing, almost as a delayed reaction. As clear proof of this fact, in 1964, deposing the perennial Oscar Peterson, he was voted best pianist in the Down Beat critics' poll. Unfortunately, in the same year his long-lived collaboration with Paul Motian came to an end.
However, Peacock is revealed as the real possible successor to LaFaro. His solos are daring excursions, in which the given harmony of the theme does not serve for "agreement" but for opposition. His irrepressible energy seems, as had happened with LaFaro, to make Evans uncomfortable, who goes off into a corner to listen to his partner's exuberant soloing, almost incredulous at so much iconoclastic vitality.
Peacock, after his brief stint with Evans, joined Albert Ayler and Don Cherry, two of the most outrageous representatives of the jazz scene of the mid-1960s. By the mid-60s Evans was beginning to be more visible on the European scene. In 1964, along with Israels and Bunker, he made a successful tour of Scandinavia, where over the years he was gaining increasing fame and popularity among jazz fans. The following year he went to France, where he would return many times and where his art has continued to be highly appreciated. The assistance of Helen Keane, by now his artistic "counselor" in addition to being his manager, was starting to bear fruit. Thanks to her Evans was able to win himself an affectionate audience at a time when the prevailing trends in jazz were going in a completely different direction, and in which the dominant and most influential figure on the scene was still that of John Coltrane.
Much less successful, however, from an artistic point of view, was the album of Evans' trio with the symphony orchestra directed by Claus Ogerman. The bright idea of having a jazz trio perform selections from the European classical repertoire, rearranged for the occasion, was touted with triumphant promotional declarations by its author Creed Taylor. It seemed that the impossible had been done and the jazz/classical opposition had been overcome. In reality, the experiment, in this instance, was an unhappy one. Paradoxically, it was not in the explicit blend of the two musical languages where Evans produced his best, but rather when his classical background unconsciously melded with his capacity to improvise and with his acute sensibility for shaping music. [emphasis mine]. Therefore, this performance, once again designed for commercial purposes, ends up sounding like an example of late Third Stream with all the limits of authenticity that afflicted its worst works. The orchestral treatment, and especially Ogerman's formal concept, was without depth or imagination, and even Evans' exquisite My Bells suffered considerable damage.”
The circumstances as well as the solemn setting of the concert hall surely combined to make this one of his most intense performances of that entire decade. The pain brought on by this sad event triggered memories that sent him plummeting back in time. He played pieces that he hadn't played since the days of the trio with LaFaro, like Spring Is Here and My Foolish Heart. He sang his pain with extreme reserve but with a depth of expression that he had seemed to have lost. The titles of the pieces he chose alluded, as always, to his state of mind; IShould Care and Who Can I Turn To? (When Nobody Needs Me?) subtly suggest his loneliness, his "loss" - that destiny to be faced all alone, with darkness the single inescapable destination.
Within a few months Israels' place was taken by 21-year-old Puerto Rican bass player Eddie Gomez. He was playing with the Gerry Mulligan group opposite Evans' trio at the Village Vanguard when he caught Bill's eye. Enormously gifted technically - an authentic virtuoso on his instrument - Gomez would stay with Evans for eleven years proving himself, in many ways, an ideal partner and the first real heir to Scott LaFaro. Gomez, in fact, continued and extended LaFaro's insights and contributed to making the bass an instrument "equal" to other melodic instruments in its expressive potential.
In reality, the problem of a drummer that was not easy to resolve for a pianist like him. He was perfectly aware of the volume problems that a drummer, discreet as he may be, could pose to his music. His ideal "group" was a duet with the bass, but he knew that to achieve a certain effect a drummer was necessary. As would come out in an interview he did in 1972 for the French magazine Jazz Hot, his biggest problem with drummers was their difficulty in lowering the tension and volume of their drumming once they had intensified it - a defect which, as Evans pointed out, robbed the performance of its "breath" and weighed it down unnecessarily.
He returned periodically to Europe performing pieces recorded maybe some ten years earlier, always looking to extract new expressive content from them, or better, to inject them with a more and more personal feeling. His choices almost always responded to emotional stimuli and personal quest, and were sometimes quite cryptic and surprising. On the live album At The Montreux Jazz Festival of 1968, for which he won another Grammy Award, we find a Gershwin hit, Embraceable You, which Evans had never recorded before and would never do again; and another, The Touch Of Your Lips, which he had never recorded before in a trio, had appeared on Art Farmer's album Modern Art (of 1958). To find a previous recording of Mother Of Earl (a piece by his friend, percussionist and composer Earl Zindars) we have to go all the way back to an obscure recording with guitarist Joe Puma in 1957. In general, additions to the trio's repertoire were few and very sparingly introduced. Towards the end of the 1960s Evans was turning more and more to film tunes, predominantly love themes, clearly preferring the compositions of Johnny Mandel and Michel Legrand.
Ttt
Part of this lexicon had already penetrated jazz, thanks to some arrangers of the late 1940s (the Gil Evans of Birth Of The Cool, for example, or some scores by Gerry Mulligan and George Russell) but, outside of big-band jazz, there was a sort of lag in appropriating and using that enormous patrimony. Bill Evans filled the gap.
An artist such as Evans, who had placed at the center of his enterprise a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it, could not be very interested in "prefabricated" sounds which had little possibility to be "molded" according to one's psychic/emotional dynamic.
There were two important consequences of all this: the first was that Evans had to literally "shift" his center of action towards the upper register of the keyboard; the other was his growing desire to play duets and leave out the drummer. When interviewed by Francois Postif of Jazz Hot after a concert in February 1972 at the Maison de l’ORTF in Paris, Evans said, -“I like the music that I am playing now, but I don’t seem to be making any progress, and that makes me sad.” His awareness of this stalled phase says a lot about Evans capacity to perceive the more or less evolving nature of his music. The golden years, those full of the tension of searching, seemed far off now. Besides, his physical state was not the best; repeated attempts to quit drugs had failed. Thus the recordings made with Gomez and Morell in the early 1970s could be considered a fairly accurate picture of a rather seriously retrogressive phase for Evans. The Bill Evans Album (1971) opened a brief period with the Columbia label, a major recording company who would not be at all sensitive to the most meaningful aspects of Evans' art (they went as far as to offer him a rock album!).
TTT(Twelve Tone Tune) on The Bill Evans Album is a clear demonstration of his technical mastery. As the title itself suggests, this piece uses the principles of serial music which requires the choice of a twelve-note row, none of which can recur until they are all used up: Evan presents his row three times in three sections of four bars each leaving, however, the relative harmonization to follow a tonal logic. Some interesting scribbles of his allow us to follow the gradual developing of his compositional idea and the process by which he arrived at the final score. Evans worked like a patient bricklayer who, after choosing his materials, little by little builds the piece. This procedure is surely much closer to the practice of classical music than to the instinctive immediacy usually associated with a jazz tune. The piece TTTT (Twelve Tone Tune Two) recorded for the first time in early 1973 and included in the live album The Tokyo Concert, was also based on the same compositional technique.
The lyrics of the song appear to have been a shocking omen of the future: a few years after its composition, in fact, Ellaine, threw herself in front of a subway train after hearing from Bill that he was leaving her for another woman. Brian Hennessey, an Englishman and mutual friend of the couple, would rightly comment on this tragedy saying "artists who show genius in one field often display ignorance in others." Recognition notwithstanding (he was voted best pianist by Down Beat in 1968, and his 1970 album Montreux II won a Grammy Award), it is difficult to consider this period of Evans' career one of noteworthy artistic evolution.
Evans got involved in two projects with large orchestra at this time. The first, in 1972, was the controversial Living Time, conceived and worked out with his friend George Russell. It was Evans himself, in an effort to satisfy Columbia Records' urging for more saleable ideas, who had come up with the idea of an album featuring him with a large ensemble. As had already happened other times in the past, Russell again appeared to be trying to force Evans into formally freer situations, acting out his usual role as “stimulator of the new and unknown” which left Evans more than a little uneasy. Russell's score on this occasion was a daring fusion of rock, informal jazz and modal music where Bill seemed a bit like a fish out of water: “Bill played like he was being pushed into some other level, hit over the head, kicked in the behind,” Russell is quoted as saying, adding, paradoxically, “I love and respect Bill's playing so much that I really couldn't resist the challenge.” The album turned out to be difficult for the average listener as well. Even with the presence of musicians like Jimmy Giuffre, Sam Rivers, Joe Henderson and Ron Carter, the outcome was a complex music which had trouble moving ahead as a result of Russell's need more to scratch his experimental itch than to accommodate the natural feeling of the musicians involved.
Freed from the onus of arranging the music (as he had had to do with the trio), and finding himself dealing with particularly stimulating harmonic sequences, Evans and his trio, surely spurred by that broad and fascinating overall "sound", gave their best. An important role was also played by Ogerman’s acute capacity to insert Bill's soloing into a well Nineteen-seventy-five was a very important year for Evans. Drummer Eliot Zigmund took his place in the trio, joining Gomez and Evans for an extensive European tour in February of that year.
It could be said that by the mid-70s Evans' was personalizing his style more in the melodic direction, in terms of themes, while his improvisational vocabulary foregrounds more a harmonic variation process rather than one of recomposing. His signature sound was by now established, even though his occasional use of the electric piano tended to flatten it. In that same year, thanks to an idea of Helen Keane's, Evans was able to fulfill one of his dreams - to record with the singer Tony Bennett. That album confirmed Evans' desire to reconnect with the tradition of the American popular song and, from this point of view, he was carrying on the musical thinking and practice of Gershwin, convinced of the originality of this tradition incarnate in the musical comedy and in forms of high quality "light" music.
Evans believed in "simple" music; but simplicity, of course, not necessarily at the expense of beauty, and it was precisely that which he demonstrated a couple of years later. Beauty has to do with a deeper and somehow mysterious dimension - a something that Bill possessed, and thanks to which he had captured, especially in the 1950s and 60s, the hearts and minds of musicians and jazz lovers all over the world. In May of 1977 Evans recorded his last album for the Fantasy label, IWill Say Goodbye, with Gomez and the sensitive Zigmund on the drums. The album's title track, written by Michel Legrand, as well as Johnny Mandel's tender Seascape, are both film score tunes which, in Evans' hands, become compelling, intimate Mendelssohn-like "songs without words.”
Here Evans revives the classical piano modules of Brahms and Chopin, Debussy and Scriabin, whom he had known and loved in his childhood and later in his college years in Louisiana. He treats these melodic lines, evoking images of separations ("goodbye") and seascapes, with a touch that unearths a rich range of color and nuance that had been lost in his years with Gomez and Morell. Here he greatly refines the classical technique of playing three or four notes with the right hand, making their upper voice "sing".
Another big film hit tune People, written by Jules Styne and made popular by Barbara Streisand, had been used by Evans a couple of years earlier for his solo album Alone Again. That performance had marked a moment in which Evans seems to have declared his belief more in interpretation than in improvisation as the primary vehicle for his musical communication. The melody of People is played for more than thirteen minutes in various keys and becomes a sort of "theme and variations" in which Evans shows the many possibilities for dealing with a simple song on piano. His use of the left hand playing arpeggio-lines as a kind of "contrapuntal" accompaniment to the right is characteristic here. This device goes beyond just simply confirming or tracing the harmonic path of the piece, and is able to create a second "voice" dialoguing with the right hand and, at times, functioning as protagonist.
The material that Evans chose for both Alone Again and I Will Say Goodbye, was almost always very easy on the ear, mostly evoking melancholy, nostalgia for something lost, something which had perhaps never existed, or else had always been unattainable. Very often, as has already been said, these were songs from films which spoke of lost, impossible or troubled love, or of the travails of couples and the unending search for happiness. Russian tradition is full of story-telling and fables, and we must not forget that Evans origins were half Russian. It is no surprise, therefore, that he was orienting himself more and more towards musical stories written to accompany picture stories. Improvisation as such seemed no longer to interest him very much. Far from the extreme harmonic quest of a Coltrane, extraneous also to the contemporary jazz/rock revolution with its new rhythms and sound, Evans was heading in a musical direction that no one but he was attracted to in those years.
Not even the birth of his son Evan the previous year had been able to fulfill that promise of regeneration that he had begun to glimpse, not to mention the fact that his marriage with Nenette was on the rocks. Perhaps all this would be enough to explain the album's mournful tone. Alongside the images of that movie which recalled his own suffering and the pain of another failure, that of his marriage, Bill was “speaking" through his music to Ellaine.
Near the end of 1977, at more or less the same time, Zigmund and Gomez - who had been with Evans for eleven years - quit the trio. Evans was left with the job of forming a completely new group. He played for about a year with the trusty Philly Joe Jones on drums, alternating different bass players, until an old college friend called his attention to a young bass player playing at the time with the Woody Herman orchestra, and who he thought had “something special that Bill would like.” Marc Johnson, the 24-year-old son of a pianist, had grown up listening to Bill Evans records. He had studied cello for a while before taking up the bass, and this, along with a truly unique musical sensibility, gave his playing that "vocal" appeal that Evans had always set such high store by in his own music and in that of his partners. The two finally met, after a certain hit-and-miss period of trying to hook up, and their first gig together was at the Village Vanguard. "Before we even finished the first number, I got the feeling immediately that this was the guy."
Evans had recently recorded another solo album New Conversations [Warner Bros. 2-3177] on which he made use of the same over-dubbing technique already employed on two previous albums, this time extending it to the electric piano. This album contains his first recorded version of Reflections in D which is played right through once without any over-dubbing - a piece which was to become one of his standards in this last brief stretch of musical activity. It was an old improvisation by Ellington in one of his rare trio recording sessions in the early 1950s which, in Evans' hands, sheds its somewhat decorative character and is turned into a piano essay of the highest order, both in terms of its formal construction as well as its haunting charm.
In July of 1978 Evans went off on a European tour. The Johnson/Jones combination worked well, regardless of some imbalances between the boisterous drummer and the refined young bass player whose true value and potential began to shine through. Johnson, gifted with an instinctive, genuine capacity for interplay, proved to be tuned in to Evans and also had a lot of his own things to say when soloing. The three performed at various European festivals (among which Umbria Jazz and Montreux), playing at times with guest musicians such as Lee Konitz and Kenny Burrell.
Shortly afterwards, sometime between late 1978 and early 1979, on the strength of another recommendation (this time from guitarist Joe Puma with whom Bill shared a long-time friendship as well as a passion for trotter-racing), Evans decided to hire drummer Joe LaBarbera for his trio, despite worries that he might not have been completely available due to his heavy studio commitments. LaBarbera’s capacity to “do the right thing at the right time” made him a drummer of considerable musical intelligence. Gifted with a strong and relaxed sense of swing a la Elvin Jones he, like Johnson, had a highly developed ability to listen to his partners. The chemistry between these two and Evans gave him reason to expect peaks like those that he had known with LaFaro and Motian and, in fact, that is what happened.
“It's there for that reason. Also a solo version of For All We Know because that's linked with the title. So, there are those two solo tracks - For All We Know- We May Never Meet Again- and then the song We Will Meet Again.” These words from an interview with Evans' in August of 1980, give us an illuminating glimpse, flashing momentarily on the secret code that often encrypted the connection between his music and his life. With the benefit of hindsight it is not difficult to see that this was precisely the period in which Evans had unconsciously decided to let loose all his self-destructive urges, and in which he began to chant his swan song.
The trio with Johnson and LaBarbera evolved rapidly. Bill was satisfied and proud of the extremely fast progress his two partners were making, and of how in tune they were with his musical world. But he was beginning to have serious problems with his health. For some time now, and probably increasingly so following his brother's tragic death, he had been using cocaine, and this was having repercussions on his way of playing, among which a strong tendency to rush the tempo (something of which he was completely aware, according to what he once said to LaBarbera).
The version he played in Paris, and which appears on the The Paris Concert Edition Two is a remarkable one. The long piano solo he improvises on the structure of this piece, whose Eastern flavor has always held a special attraction for him, becomes an amazing recapitulation of all the elements that have contributed to his piano style, of everything that he has ever loved in music. Shades of classical music (Khachaturian, Rachmaninoff, his favorite Russian composers), harmonic derivations from Tristano an entire piano tradition ranging from Romanticism to the 20th century and jazz are fused in this Nardis, something which has no antecedents in either jazz or in the classical music tradition.
The collaboration of the highest caliber offered him by Johnson and LaBarbera was never routine and brought him back that tension and passion for the musical quest with which he had peaked twenty years earlier at the time of his unparalleled collaboration with Motian and LaFaro: “This trio is very much connected to the first trio ... I feel that the trio I have now is karmic.” Having previously been heavily involved in Zen, and also due to his Russian Orthodox background which had given him a natural aptitude and sensitivity for the metaphysical and spiritual, he felt that having these two young musicians alongside him was a sign of destiny, of the "circularity' of things and their inexplicable propensity for moving according to a script already written.
As often, unfortunately, happens in cases like this, his passing away sparked renewed interest in the work of this musician who had never, in his lifetime, drawn huge crowds; an anti-hero who, discreetly but with unusual depth, had penetrated the hearts of both jazz fans and ordinary listeners everywhere. In 1981 Evans was inducted into Down Beat magazine's Hall of Fame, taking the "place of glory' reserved for him alongside the greatest and most important names in the history of jazz. Memorial recordings and concerts abounded recalling this reserved poet of the piano able to reveal through music his most intimate self.
